The
Sunday programme on Radio Four this week reported a survey on beliefs about
life after death. The company ComRes had polled two thousand people and found
that only six out of ten people who call themselves nominal Christians said
they believed in an afterlife. This apparently rises to eight out of ten for
people who call themselves committed Christians. On the other hand 20% of
atheists, apparently, did believe in an afterlife.
These
are perplexing results. Perhaps it depends on how you put the question. What
exactly do you mean by an “afterlife”? The Sunday Programme asked a random
selection of people on the Clapham omnibus and got a whole range of really
rather vague ideas that could probably be best described as optimism rather
than faith. Those who didn’t believe either didn’t want to, imagining an afterlife
must be just like this life only stretched out indefinitely, or else cited a
lack of evidence of whatever they supposed an afterlife might be.
For
Christians, however, our faith is not based on groundless optimism. Neither has
it anything to do with ideas of something resembling this life carrying on
indefinitely in some kind of spirit world. Such beliefs have more to do with
folklore and paganism than they have to do with the Bible.
The
heart of Christian faith is something very specific: and that is that Jesus,
the Messiah, was raised from the dead. Christians cannot talk about life after
death apart from Christ. What we believe in is not any old afterlife, but resurrection,
and we only know what that is by looking to Christ. Resurrection is nothing
less than the taking of the whole of human life, body and soul, into the life
of God. It begins with Jesus, and it is as much a present reality as it is an
event in time.
In
Matthew’s account, that we heard this evening, the resurrection in fact has already
taken place. The tomb is already empty when the angel rolls back the stone;
Jesus is already elsewhere. But the women then meet him; the resurrection is a
present reality, too. The resurrection is an existence utterly unconstrained by
the old boundaries between life and death. We cannot think that way any more.
So, for
Christians, belief in life after death cannot be separated from the
resurrection of Jesus. It is true that the soul continues to exist after the
death of the body, and before the general bodily resurrection of the human race
in Christ that we profess in the Creed. There are ample proofs of this in
scripture, for example, Jesus talks about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob being alive;
he promises paradise today to the repentant thief; St Peter speaks of Jesus on
Holy Saturday “preaching to the spirits” of those who had lived before him, so
that they too may be saved.
Theologians
have explained this by saying that the soul is the “form of the body”, that it,
it is the principle whose presence makes a living body a person, and whose
absence means that a dead body is merely inanimate matter. Unlike the body, the
soul contains no principle of corruption within it, and therefore it continues
to exist after death.
But the
survival of the soul is not the main thing that Christians believe about life
after death. The soul remains the form of the body, and will inform the body
once again when we share in the resurrection of Christ. It is in him that we
will be raised. It is with him that we will share his glorified incorruptible state
in the Kingdom of God, when not only our souls, but also our bodies, will be
deified by the indwelling Holy Spirit.
Jesus,
as the head, and the Church, as his body, are the “whole Christ” in a wonderful
phrase of St Augustine. And it is the whole Christ that is raised. The lost
unity of the human race is restored in Christ. Humanity will become in truth
what it was always meant to be, the image of God the Holy Trinity, many
distinct persons sharing one nature. As St Paul says, as in Adam all die even
so in Christ shall all be made alive. And that resurrection life, the dwelling
of Christ in us and we in him, begins in this life by faith and the grace of
baptism.
Our
baptism both restores us in the image of Christ and imprints on us the pattern
of his death and resurrection. Eternal life, life after death, begins in the
font. We renew our promises tonight to stir up and renew in us the grace of
baptism that we received once and for all.
The
resurrection is the pillar and foundation of the Christian faith. And that
remains true whatever happens in the world. There have been dark and terrible
times in the history of the world, within the living memory of some of us here.
Tonight the news may seem to be full of menace and anxiety. But Jesus says, “in
the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world”.
The
resurrection is that conquest, and in Christ it is a conquest that we share.
Emerging from the font as a new creation, we no longer have to concern ourselves
with the question “will I survive death?”. Instead, we say with St Paul, “It is
no longer I who live, but Christ in me”, and we know that the resurrection life
has already begun.
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